Snake

Snake is the game that shipped on everything. You steer a line that grows every time it eats, and the only thing that can kill you is the wall or the tail you have been building.

How to play

1. Press an arrow key, WASD, or swipe to start moving.
2. Eat the coral square to grow by one segment and score ten points.
3. Do not run into the wall or into your own body.
4. The snake speeds up as it lengthens, down to a floor so late runs stay playable.

Two modes worth trying separately

Walls is the original. The board is bounded and hitting an edge ends the run, so you spend the early game learning to turn early enough.

Wrap around connects the edges — leave the right side and you reappear on the left. This sounds easier, and for the first thirty seconds it is. But without walls to push your tail against, the tail spreads across the middle of the board and you lose the safe channels that walls mode gives you. Experienced players often find wrap harder past a certain length.

What actually kills you

Beginners die by hitting walls. Everyone else dies by self-trapping: entering a region enclosed by their own tail with no exit large enough for the body still following.

The habit that fixes this is to ask, before every turn, whether the space you are moving into connects back to the open board. It is a slower way to play and it roughly doubles most people’s scores.

The second habit is to keep the snake compact rather than sprawling. A tail coiled tightly along one edge occupies the same number of squares as a tail zig-zagging across the centre, but it leaves a far more useful shape of free space.

Nothing to install

The whole game is a few kilobytes of JavaScript drawing to a canvas. There is no engine to download, no loading screen, and no account. Scores are kept in your browser and nowhere else.

Tips

• Travel in long straight lines and turn late. Every early turn leaves a fold of tail behind that you will have to navigate around for the rest of the run.
• Keep to the edges while the snake is short. A tail packed against the walls leaves the middle open, and the middle is where you need room later.
• Before you commit to a corner, check that you can still reach open space afterwards. Most deaths are not collisions — they are entering a pocket with no exit.
• When the food spawns somewhere awkward, do not go straight for it. Circle once to buy time and take a cleaner approach; the food will not disappear.